How America can lead itself out of its mental health crisis
America is in the midst of a mental health crisis, but not necessarily because more people are sick. The bigger issue is a culture – amplified by the media and fueled in part by my own profession. They conflate genuine mental illness with everyday emotional discomfort and weakness.
After more than two decades as a psychotherapist, I've seen patients stuck in this mindset that rewards fragility, elevates victimhood and leaves people feeling powerless rather than giving them the resilience they need to face life's challenges.
According to a 2023 Gallup Poll, 29% of U.S. adults have been diagnosed with depression, up nearly 10% since 2015. That year marked a turning point in American culture. Following high-profile incidents like the shooting of Michael Brown, a young Black man in Ferguson, Missouri, by a White police officer, national conversations around race, power and identity intensified.
In the years that followed, DEI ideology swept through nearly every major institution, including the mental health field. Therapy shifted from fostering resilience to unpacking systemic injustice. Patients were increasingly cast as either oppressors or oppressed, reinforcing helplessness.
Yes, real societal problems exist, but therapy isn't for validating grievances. It's for building people up. When it becomes a space to wallow, it stalls growth and reinforces a sense of victimhood.
This mindset isn't just weakening individuals. It's tearing the country apart. Look at the crowds celebrating the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and elevating his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, to folk hero status. Look at the burned and battered Teslas across America, and at families fractured over political differences.
Modern grievance-based therapy convinces people that their problems are insurmountable, leaving them ill-equipped to face life's challenges. It fosters a mindset where discomfort is treated as trauma – and builds a generation unprepared for the real world. We've become a nation of emotional lightweights: fragile, divided and unable to cope.
I see this firsthand as a psychotherapist in New York City and Washington, D.C. Patients come to me after years in therapy, convinced their struggles stem from injustice. They've been pathologized and politicized; validated in their victimhood but never pushed to grow. What they need isn't another hour of venting. They need direction and accountability.
One patient, for example, had spent years experiencing anxiety without learning how to confront it. Her therapists told her the problem stemmed from social inequality – something beyond her control. The more she believed this, the more anxious and helpless she felt. But once we shifted the focus to action, her anxiety began to lift.
Therapy fixated on social justice at the expense of growth doesn't heal – it traps people in rumination. It infiltrates schools, workplaces and media. Young people are taught that every challenge is trauma and that discomfort should be avoided.
It wasn't always this way. Americans faced hardship and grew stronger. That mindset built this country. It's time to bring it back. This isn't about politics – it's about whether we still believe in the spirit of self-reliance and resilience, or if we've traded it for victimhood.
Success, family and personal agency aren't left or right – they're the foundation of who we are. They remain the key to renewal. If we want to revive our cultural and mental backbone, we must reject fragility and reclaim the strength that once defined us.
Here's how:
This is bigger than mental health. It's about who we are as a nation. If we continue down the path of victimhood and blame, we risk becoming fragile and dependent. But if we reclaim the mindset that built this country – grit, responsibility and determination – we can create something stronger and more enduring than any policy: a culture of resilience and strength.
Promoting the classic American values of resilience and responsibility can lead the way. It's time to rebuild America's backbone – not just for ourselves, but for future generations.
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An Uproar at the NIH
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Updated at 10:26 a.m. on June 9, 2025 Since winning President Donald Trump's nomination to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya—a health economist and prominent COVID contrarian who advocated for reopening society in the early months of the pandemic—has pledged himself to a culture of dissent. 'Dissent is the very essence of science,' Bhattacharya said at his confirmation hearing in March. 'I'll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement, respectfully.' Two months into his tenure at the agency, hundreds of NIH officials are taking Bhattacharya at his word. More than 300 officials, from across all of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya that condemns the changes that have thrown the agency into chaos in recent months—and calls on their director to reverse some of the most damaging shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency's current allocation. The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. None of the NIH officials I spoke with for this story could recall another time in their agency's history when staff have spoken out so publicly against a director. But none of them could recall, either, ever seeing the NIH so aggressively jolted away from its core mission. 'It was time enough for us to speak out,' Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, who has signed her name to the letter, told me. To preserve American research, government scientists—typically focused on scrutinizing and funding the projects most likely to advance the public's health—are now instead trying to persuade their agency's director to help them win a political fight with the White House. In an emailed statement, Bhattacharya said, 'The Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months, including the continuing support of the NIH for international collaboration. Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive. We all want the NIH to succeed.' A spokesperson for HHS also defended the policies the letter critiqued, arguing that the NIH is 'working to remove ideological influence from the scientific process' and 'enhancing the transparency, rigor, and reproducibility of NIH-funded research.' The agency spends most of its nearly $48 billion budget powering science: It is the world's single-largest public funder of biomedical research. But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants—originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, 'the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled. 'It's nice to have free speech,' he said, before carrying right on. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
3 hours ago
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‘We're Just Becoming a Weapon of the State'
Since winning President Donald Trump's nomination to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya—a health economist and prominent COVID contrarian who advocated for reopening society in the early months of the pandemic—has pledged himself to a culture of dissent. 'Dissent is the very essence of science,' Bhattacharya said at his confirmation hearing in March. 'I'll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement, respectfully.' Two months into his tenure at the agency, hundreds of NIH officials are taking Bhattacharya at his word. More than 300 officials, from across all of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya that condemns the changes that have thrown the agency into chaos in recent months—and calls on their director to reverse some of the most damaging shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency's current allocation. The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. None of the NIH officials I spoke with for this story could recall another time in their agency's history when staff have spoken out so publicly against a director. But none of them could recall, either, ever seeing the NIH so aggressively jolted away from its core mission. 'It was time enough for us to speak out,' Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, who has signed her name to the letter, told me. To preserve American research, government scientists—typically focused on scrutinizing and funding the projects most likely to advance the public's health—are now instead trying to persuade their agency's director to help them win a political fight with the White House. Bhattacharya, the NIH, and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The agency spends most of its nearly $48 billion budget powering science: It is the world's single-largest public funder of biomedical research. But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants —originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, ' the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled
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My 5-year-old survived cancer – twice. Don't put politics before medical research.
Few issues in American politics have consistently united both parties like the fight against cancer. While funding levels and strategies may differ, Democrats and Republicans alike recognize that cancer doesn't discriminate – and neither should our commitment to defeat it. Under the Biden administration, the Cancer Moonshot was relaunched to accelerate progress toward a cure. More recently, President Donald Trump announced his 'Stargate' initiative, which aims to harness artificial intelligence in detecting and treating cancer, including through personalized mRNA vaccines. In the United States, cancer is the leading cause of death by disease for children after infancy. Across the political spectrum, there remains a shared hope: that no one should have to endure the pain of losing a loved one or fight this deadly disease. Yet today, that consensus is showing signs of strain. State legislatures across the country are advancing bills to ban or severely restrict the use of – and further research into – breakthrough technologies like mRNA, a technology that is driving promising advancements in cancer. What should be a story of American scientific innovation is being twisted into a political talking point. And it's putting lives at risk. Opinion: Biden's diagnosis shows two things. Cancer hits everyone and some forgot that. If the politicians pushing these bans spent even a few minutes inside a pediatric oncology unit, maybe they'd understand. They'd see floors filled with sick children on small bicycles, pulling IV poles behind them. Children in hospital beds, brave beyond measure. And parents clinging to hope. I've seen it firsthand. I'm a mother whose 5-year-old daughter has survived cancer – twice. My daughter Charlie is one of a small percentage of pediatric cancer patients whose tumors don't show up on standard blood tests. Her cancer went undetected for more than a year. By the time doctors found it, it had already spread to her liver. She was just 3 years old and had Stage 4 cancer. Once Charlie's cancer was detected, we rushed into treatment: high-dose chemotherapy, stem cell transplants and multiple surgeries. After months of treatment, we got the news every parent prays for: Charlie was cancer-free. But just a few months later, scans revealed a relapse. Two small nodules were found on her lung. Her baby brother was only two months old when we learned her cancer had returned. Relapse treatment was grueling. Charlie lost weight and muscle mass. She needed a feeding tube to stay nourished, hydrated and medicated. But through it all, she never lost her smile. Her strength became ours. And while we juggled caring for a newborn and two other children, we held onto hope, because science gave us a reason to. Thanks to expert care at Seattle Children's and research-backed protocols, she's once again cancer-free. She started preschool this year. She's coloring, laughing and chasing her siblings again. Every option we had was made possible by decades of public investment in research. Families who came before us joined clinical trials. Lawmakers chose to fund pediatric science and cancer research. That is the same kind of work mRNA research builds on today. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Researchers are developing an mRNA-based diagnostic test that could catch cancers like hers earlier, when they're more treatable. The test uses mRNA from her original tumor to detect any circulating cancer cells through a simple blood draw. Catching a relapse early could be lifesaving. We first learned about this test in 2023, and knowing it's almost within reach brings us, and families like ours, so much hope. Beyond mRNA-based diagnostic tests, mRNA has also shown early promise as a therapy for cancer patients, enabling personalized treatment that could more effectively target one's tumor. That kind of innovation is exactly what's under threat right now. The role of mRNA technology in oncology has been studied for decades, and yet some lawmakers want to roll this progress back, arguing it is untested and unsafe. This technology, along with many innovations that come from federally supported medical research, is a critical source of hope for families around the world. I'm a doctor. So is my mother. When she got cancer, I realized how little that mattered. | Opinion When you're watching your child battle cancer, every advancement matters. I know firsthand how critical it is to catch cancer early and have access to every possible treatment option. When politicians politicize science – when they ban or restrict it based on misinformation and politics – they aren't protecting families like mine. They're limiting our options. They're slowing down the breakthroughs that could save lives. We can't afford to let misinformation and polarized politics dictate the future of lifesaving research. Thanks to innovation in medical research, Charlie is thriving today, but far too many kids are still fighting. Let's ensure science continues to move forward for all of our children. Emily Stenson is a childhood cancer advocate and the mother of 5-year-old two-time cancer survivor Charlie Stenson. She lives in Seattle. You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cancer research saved my child's life. Fund mRNA innovation | Opinion
